{"id":7407,"date":"2013-12-30T14:20:00","date_gmt":"2013-12-30T13:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/?p=7407"},"modified":"2013-12-30T14:20:00","modified_gmt":"2013-12-30T13:20:00","slug":"bedtime-reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/2013\/12\/30\/bedtime-reading\/","title":{"rendered":"Bedtime reading"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A fit of nostalgia following the recent death of the actor Lewis Collins has seen me revisiting old episodes of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Professionals_(TV_series)\" target=\"_blank\">The Professionals<\/a>, which was probably the first grown-up TV series I watched as a kid. It&#8217;s very entertaining, not least in the way it confounds expectations. The default position may be causal sexism, for instance (and much of it is appalling), but then suddenly there&#8217;s a surprisingly sensitive discussion about the challenges of being a lesbian in the police force. Equally unexpected are the high-brow cultural references. I was taken aback when <em>Waiting for Godot<\/em> was mentioned in an early episode, but nothing prepared me for Doyle&#8217;s bedtime reading in episode 9 of the first series, <em>When the Heat Cools Off.<\/em><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_7409\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/Screen-Shot-2013-12-30-at-00.08.01.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-7409\" class=\"size-large wp-image-7409 \" alt=\"The Professionals, series 1, episode 9: bedtime reading\" src=\"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/Screen-Shot-2013-12-30-at-00.08.01-1024x640.png\" width=\"600\" height=\"375\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/Screen-Shot-2013-12-30-at-00.08.01-1024x640.png 1024w, https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/Screen-Shot-2013-12-30-at-00.08.01-300x187.png 300w, https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/Screen-Shot-2013-12-30-at-00.08.01.png 1280w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-7409\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Professionals, series 1, episode 9: bedtime reading<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Yes folks, that is a copy of Zhores Medvedev&#8217;s\u00a0<em>Ten Years After Ivan Denisovich<\/em>. The episode, which reveals something of Doyle&#8217;s backstory in the police, revolves around the reinvestigation of a case in which a man may (or may not) have been wrongly imprisoned, so this may explain the choice of reading matter. It&#8217;s a reminder, as well, of what a high profile Solzhenitsyn had in the seventies &#8211; even my parents had a copy of the <em>Gulag Archipelago <\/em>on their shelves, despite having no noticeable interest in Russian literature or Soviet politics. But while one might perhaps have expected to see a copy of <em>Ivan Denisovich<\/em> itself, the Medvedev book seems to me to be on a different level altogether. Is this the most obscure cultural reference ever to appear in a popular TV programme? Answers on a postcard please.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A fit of nostalgia following the recent death of the actor Lewis Collins has seen me revisiting old episodes of The Professionals, which was probably the first grown-up TV series I watched as a kid. It&#8217;s very entertaining, not least in the way it confounds expectations. The default position may be causal sexism, for instance [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,8],"tags":[14,497,498],"class_list":["post-7407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gulag","category-russian-literature","tag-solzhenitsyn","tag-the-professionals","tag-zhores-medvedev"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2MwXo-1Vt","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7407"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7407\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7419,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7407\/revisions\/7419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahjyoung.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}